Clumsy rollout of Bootstrap 3 – classes added while in RC state

About 3 weeks ago I started a project that needed some responsiveness. I went straight to getbootstrap.com to download the latest release of Twitter Bootstrap.

What I got was the download page of Bootstrap 3.

It was still marked as release candidate – but hey – they wouldn’t offer it this way if it wasn’t at least nearly ready for productive use.
IIRC they even used redirects to the make sure people don’t end up at BS2 when coming from search engines. So I thought that they were serious with the release.

I was wrong.

While working on the project I found out that the documentation was so incomplete that I was forced to browse through the CSS-Code to find out what BS3 has to offer and how to use it.
With some efforts I managed to understand the beast and coded away happily because I thought that at least the features (can we speak about an API if we talk about a CSS-Framework?) were complete and all that was missing was some documentation and bugfixes while they pushed forward with BS3.

I was wrong.

Nearly done with the project I wanted to fix some responsive-issues today and was happy to see that the documentation had grown. I found out that my problem could be solved by using .col-lg-push-* and .col-lg-pull-* classes. But somehow this didn’t work in my project. After some research I found out why … my bootstrap.css simply didn’t contain those classes.

So I downloaded the current release which is now directly pulled from GIT which shows heavy activity.
3 weeks ago I downloaded a nice RC distribution ZIP. Today I got a snapshot of the repo.

Looking into this new version I was happy to find my missing classes.
The comments inside the css showed both ‘Bootstrap v3.0.0′ but who cares about versioning?
I’ve seen this with some jQuery plugins before – often the code completely lacks versioning info.
If after some months a problem pops up you can’t even guess which version is used and if there are patches against it.

But back to Bootstrap.
What I’m asking myself is: What do they think is the purpose of a RELEASE CANDIDATE.
While features are added this isn’t even beta – and as long as it is directly ‘released’ from the GIT repo it is simply BLEADING EDGE.

What was so wrong about BS2 to be so hasty with rolling out BS3?

I cross my fingers that my current version is complete enough to finish my project.
Now I have to start fixing things – because the whole design is b0rked now – I think they ‘fixed’ some issued.